Phantoms of remembrance : memory and oblivion at the end of the first millennium
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Phantoms of remembrance : memory and oblivion at the end of the first millennium
Princeton University Press, c1994
Available at 13 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [219]-239) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
This text makes important inroads into the widely discussed topic of historical memory, evoking the everyday lives of 11th-century people and both their written and nonwritten ways of preserving the past. Women praying for their dead, monks creating and recreating their archives, scribes choosing which royal families of the past to applaud and which to forget - it is from such sources that most of our knowledge of the medieval period comes. Through descriptions of various acts of remembrance, including the naming of children and the recording of visions, the author unearths a wide range of approaches to preserving the past as it was or formulating the past that an individual or group prefers to imagine. By focusing on a turning point in medieval history, one in which an effort was made to make a cultural break with the previous centuries, Geary offers an example of specific mental and social structures that filtered the memories communicated by social elites and ordinary individuals alike. The author focuses on the former Carolingian empire to compare how people from Provence to Bavaria recalled their familial, institutional, and regional pasts.
In examining written accounts and documents, he considers attitudes toward a wide range of topics - from gender and fashion to politics and religious practices - and shows how these attitudes reveal the social transformations taking place in the 11th century as well as the ways in which people had already begun to think about the past. Throughout his investigation, the author maintains that what matters is not so much the content of what is remembered but rather the ways in which memories are structured and represented, and ultimately what is forgotten along the way.
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